HuffPo: Workers “Really Deserve” a $21.72 Minimum Wage
According to a new study by the George Soros-funded
Center for Economic Policy and Research, minimum wage should be $21.72
an hour to keep up with the increase of worker productivity.
Highlighting
that study, The Huffington Post bemoaned President Barack Obama’s call
for a higher minimum wage as a “far cry from what workers really
deserve,” in a Feb. 13 blog post.
What
HuffPo, the Center for Economic Policy, and even Obama failed to
consider in their calls for a higher minimum wage is how these increases
affect the poor.
James Sherk, Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics for The Heritage Foundation, responded
to Obama’s State of the Union call for raising minimum wage to
$9-an-hour. Obama said in his speech that “no one who works full-time
should have to live in poverty,” so the minimum wage should be
increased. But Sherk pointed out there is “no correlation between higher
minimum wage and lower poverty.”
He
continued with three facts about minimum wage that is not considered
while pushing a minimum wage hike. “First, relatively few minimum wage
workers are poor,” he wrote. Many of these workers are high school and
college students who are working part time and not supporting themselves
or a family on their income.
Sherk
also pointed out that “higher minimum wages cost some workers their
jobs” and makes “entry-level positions harder to find.” And lastly, and
something the left should pay more attention to, is that raises in the minimum wage “claws back raises” in welfare aid received from the government.
In 2009, The Wall Street Journal noted in the Review & Outlook section, that “the minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees down to $0.00”
by taking away their jobs. Citing a prediction by UC-Irvine economist
David Neumark, who warned the 70-cent-an-hour increase would cost
300,000 jobs, WSJ wrote that teen joblessness was up. “Some 330,000 teen
jobs have vanished in two months.”
