Shot in the Dark

Tag: Minimum Wage

  • Tech Vendors: “Thanks, Representative Winkler!”

    The inevitable result of across-the-board minimum wage hikes?  Fewer minimum wage jobs. Case in point; as minimum wages around the country rose during the 2000s, McDonalds started pre-cooking its hamburger patties, so they’d only need to be reheated in the stores.  This got rid of most of the traditional “burger-flipper” jobs, the ones that liberals…

  • Underreach!

    Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Minnesota House passes an increase in the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour. Sure, it’s the highest in the nation; but if they made it $100 per hour, we could ALL be rich. Cheap bastards. Joe Doakes Where’s the ambition to do Big Things, Joe? Make it $500 an…

  • Living Wage

    A bill in the Senate would pay your Senators more for the privilege of jacking up your taxes and grabbing your guns – but at least relieve them of the burden of having to tell you about it. SF 1534, by Senator Sandy Pappas (what else, DFL – St. Paul) would make Legislative pay equal…

  • The Knights Who Say “Living Wage!”

    SCENE:  Adriana and Michael GONZALES, age 30 and 32, owners of a small family commercial cleaning business and parents of three children, are walking through the woods near Minnehaha Park.  It’s foggy and foreboding. ADRIANA: Mike, did you see something in the woods? MICHAEL:  Yeah.  Looks like – guys in helmets? ADRIANA:  This is weird.…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Ryan Winkler, Brezhnev-Style Economist

    Conservatives joke that liberals just. Don’t.  Get. Economics. We joke, at times, that at some point a liberal is going to push for a “living wage” statute calling for a $100/hour minimum wage as a means to end poverty, followed by a bill barring any layoffs and banning bankruptcy. It’s a joke.  Some liberals shake…

  • The Myth Of The Harmless Minimum Wage Increase

    The left’s been bruiting about a study that shows unemployment isn’t that badly affected by minimum wage increases. For example, the study claims that a 10% hike in the minimum wage translates over time into about a 1% hike in unemployment among low-wage, low-skill workers – the ones that get minimum wage. BikeBubba, over at BikeBubba’s Boulangerie, unpacks…

  • A Conversation About The Minimum Wage

    I had a chat with Avery LIBRELLE, a liberal friend of mine at a local coffee shop in Saint Paul; Avery had just gotten off from a shift of answering phones for MPR’s pledge drive. LIBRELLE:  I’m glad the DFL are talking about raising the minimum wage.  It’s time the working poor caught a break.…

  • Remember!

    Teenagers’ unemployement rates are completely out of control: Employers are choosing older workers, saying it’s cheaper to hire a more experienced worker, than, say, two teenagers, who will need more training, experts say. “It’s too expensive for us to hire teens that don’t have experience,” said Karin Devencenzi, the general manager at Southpark Seafood Grill &…

  • Poverty

    In 1991, my then-wife and I made $18,000.  Together.  This, with one kid the whole year, and another born in August.  We lived in a rat-trap of a house in the Midway: three drafty bedrooms, and a foundation that let mice in in droves; the rodents gamboled about inside the walls like Britney and Lindsay on…

  • Minimum Brain

    After years of exhorting (in the editorial pages) the government to jack up the minimum wage, as well as trying to push city governments to adopt “living wage” standards, the Strib notes that only a tiny, shrinking minority actually works for the minimum wage: “I was working two jobs near minimum wage,” [a high school…

  • Lee Roper-Batker: “Two Plus Two Equals Orange”

    We’ve talked about the “wage gap” in this space before, by way of noting that as long as you compare apples and apples, there really is none. The media has carried Op Eds on both sides of the issue this past week – from the sublime (or at least sensible) to the ridiculous. Representing sensible,…

  • Robbing Pedro to pay Pauline

    Jay Reding on the minimum wage: The left wants to argue that the minimum wage is a transfer of assets from the rich (business owners) to the poor. The reality of the minimum wage is that it ends up being an asset transfer between poor people — or more likely an asset transfer between disadvantaged…