No, not the 80’s song by Nick Lowe. The “kindness” brought to you by a government that just doesn’t seem to understand basic economics. Employment of minimum wage earners keeps going down (the cruel part) because of the hikes in the minimum wage the government keeps mandating (the “kind” part).




So it should be no surprise to see teen jobs disappearing or to hear bleak testimony from employers across the country that make these hiring decisions.

And it’s not just teens looking for a summer job that this hurts.

There’s no end to the economic data that confirm these common-sense observations. Research from the University of Georgia, the University of Connecticut and Cornell University indicates that increasing the minimum wage causes four times more job loss for employees without a high school diploma than it does for the general population.

Furthermore, minimum wage hikes don’t effectively target the people who are typically portrayed as the key beneficiaries — low-income adults raising kids. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, just 14 percent of those who benefited from the most recent federal minimum wage hike are sole earners in families with children.

The whole “living wage” canard used to buttress the case for increased minimum wage, then, is an incredibly small amount of those who benefit, and arguable more folks are hurt because of it. The question always asked is, “Is it better to have a lower-paying job, or no job at all?” Democrats will consistently ignore or hand-wave away this question, in the interest of “caring”.

Well ask those unemployed folks how much that “caring” helped them.

[tags]minimum wage,economy[/tags]

Filed under: DemocratsDougEconomics & TaxesGovernmentPolitics
