It's been a long time coming, but the gradual crushing of the middle-class Has. To. Stop. The fastest and most effective way to do that is to Raise the Minimum-Wage which will - just like the now expired payroll tax cut - put more spendable cash in the hands of millions of Americans and foster the surge of Demand that businesses can foster a need to grow and hire more employees to service the increase in clients.
It's really as simple as that.
Republicans say it will cost jobs, but that's never been shown to be true.
For instance, in 2009 researchers conducted a review of 64 minimum-wage studies published between 1972 and 2007 measuring the impact of minimum wages on teenage employment and when they graphed “every employment estimate contained in these studies (over 1,000 in total), weighting each estimate by its statistical precision, they found that the most precise estimates were heavily clustered at or near zero employment effects.” The following year, researchers published a study comparing restaurant employment differences across 1,381 U.S. counties with different levels of the minimum wage” in every quarter between 1990 and 2006. Their conclusion: “The large negative elasticities in the traditional specification are generated primarily by regional and local differences in employment trends that are unrelated to minimum wage policies.”
And then you have GOpers like Marsha Blackburn who inadverdantly makes this point even stronger while claiming that having a "starter job" as a teenager for just $2.14 hour was something that helped her "Build Character". Ok, sure. Y'know what $2.14 an hour - which was nearly double the then minimum wage - would now be in 2012 dollars?
Between $12.78 and $14.18 an hour.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
BLACKBURN: What we’re hearing from moms and from school teachers is that there needs to be a lower entry level, so that you can get 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds into the process. Chuck, I remember my first job, when I was working in a retail store, down there, growing up in Laurel, Mississippi. I was making like $2.15 an hour. And I was taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions. And I appreciated that opportunity.
So basically if we followed Marsha Blackburn's lead and people - many of whom are NOT teenagers - should at
least expect almost
double what the President asked for in this years State of the Union.
The truth is that by freezing the minimum wage, U.S. employers have been getting more and more value for less and less overhead. If the Minimum Wage had kept up with Productivity over the last 40 years- it would be $21.72/ Hour
My that chart does look a great deal like this one, which shows the growing income gap between the average working and some of those in the 1% - Financial Services Workers.
if this trend is ever going to be reversed, those with the greatest need - those at the bottom - are going to need a boost simply to
catch up to what they've been missing out on for the last 3 decades. Working Harder and Getting Less and Less for it is a Raw Deal that has been fostered by a Financial Sector that is most happy to have America product one single exchangeable commodity -
Debt.
Vyan