…in exactly the same was as gun control addresses crime.
Not at all, but for the sinecure-mongering and virtue-trumpeting:
The study, led by the University of California, Irvine economist David Neumark and published by the business-backed Employment Policies Institute, finds that, over the course of decades, higher minimum wages don’t reduce poverty in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Rather, the analysis finds that a $1 increase in the minimum wage raises poverty rates and government dependency by about 3 percent.
The report also finds evidence that cash welfare fails to lower poverty.
To be fair, none of them were intended to do any such thing.
If you look at the effects of minimum wage hikes on communities of color and low income, you’d almost think they were intended to be racist.
And it’d be hard to prove you wrong:
Take, for instance, the minimum wage. The founding fathers of progressivism at the University of Wisconsin, but also such figures as Sidney Webb, saw the discriminatory aspects of the minimum wage as among its chief selling points. “Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Webb said of the “unemployables,” “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.” E. A. Ross, the extremely influential progressive intellectual and author of the “race suicide” thesis (who was particularly bigoted against Chinese labor), explained the benefits of a minimum wage pithily: “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.” In other words, if you force employers to only pay a white man’s wages, he will only employ white men. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson, explained: “Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
Coates doesn’t mention the words “liberal” or “progressive” or “conservative. His indictment is aimed squarely at “America.” And as a collective matter, America surely deserves blame for the mistreatment of African Americans in the past. But it’s also worth noting that the more immediate authors of the “half-assed social contract” Coates rightly denounces are today counted as champions of the progressive movement.
As in all other things progressive – it’s better to appear to be doing good than to actually do good.
So pretty much the results that anyone with a basic understanding of supply and demand curves predicted.
We might simply say that the minimum wage does for poverty what gun control does for crime. It makes it go up. Those liberals really, really love you…dead.
I’m thinking of running for office on a platform of Putting Youth and Minorities First to Be Out Of A Job.
“My fellow Americans, we have a problem in our society. Too many young people are working today. They ought to be studying to further their education, or playing sports to learn critical teambuilding skills. Instead, they are working for meager wages at low skill jobs. I intend to put a stop to that. My proposal will make it too expensive for businesses to hire them. If they’re unemployed, young people will have more time to devote to improving their lives and that’s in their long-term benefit. And not only young people. Minorities, especially African-Americans, suffer under the cultural bigotry of White America. Who says working an entry-level job is good for you? Who says it builds character? Who says it teaches accountability, responsibility, pride in a job well done? White people say that, which is an attitude based solely on a few thousand years of experience of Western Civilization. I reject the implicit cultural bias in their assumptions. My proposal will make it too expensive for businesses to hire low-skill workers which in this community, consists principally of African-Americans. They will benefit by having more time to devote to performing ancestral rituals while wearing colorful native garb. I will accomplish all this by raising the minimum wage. Vote for me.”
If my tan was a little darker, I could probably pull it off, at least in St. Paul.
JD, your campaign speechlet is just loaded with enough proggy buzzwords and the snark is sufficiently ambiguous that, if the public were never able to connect “Joe Doakes” to your real personhood, I honestly believe you would be a serious contender in StP’s runoff voting
circusextravaganzaIf your making minimum wage past the age of 35, you have failed at life, period. If you are making it at 45 or 50 you have screwed up not only your life but your kids.
Venezuela has a minimum wage (1,307,646 bolivars a month ) – they say its working just fine:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/02/news/economy/venezuela-minimum-wage/index.html