Paying The Piper

Although I covered this issue in my equally obscure blog of several years ago (Maximum Wage), I thought it worth revisiting in light of comments made in this piece: Minimum Wage Hikes Deserve Share Of Blame For High Unemployment. At the time, the minimum wage in the U.S. was $5.15. I engaged in a discussion with someone who couldn't see the harm in raising this wage one dollar per hour. On the surface, this seemed a reasonable thought. After all, what is a dollar between friends? However, as I pointed out at the time, it amounted to a nearly 20% increase to the minimum. Money has yet to be found springing forth from trees.

The Bush administration, in its finite wisdom, allowed the newly crowned liberal congress of the time to pass a bill that would increase the wage in each of the next three years. The change in the years from 2007 to 2009 was $.70 per hour per year. The first year amounted to an increase of nearly 14%. The second was an increase of 12% from the previous year, 27% cumulatively. In 2009, the increase amounted to 10.7%, a mere 40.8% cumulatively. This means that any business employing people at the minimum needed to increase their payroll for these people by 40% over that three year period. Why do we have an employment problem? I can't imagine.

Four years later, we sit mired in an economic slump from which there appears little relief. After eight years of general ineptitude, we are now subjected to a more specific economic ineptitude seldom rivaled. Nations around the world are waking up to the fiscal reality of social engineering while our current incarnation of Big Brother takes us down that same path. The minimum wage is another of the many examples of such engineering at work. While there's no reason to expect this or any administration to come to its senses about the minimum wage, there is little doubt that such tampering has had an impact.