That's what George Will advises.
Today, raising the federal minimum wage is a bad idea whose time has come, for two reasons, the first of which is that some Democrats have an evidently incurable disease -- New Deal Nostalgia. Witness Nancy Pelosi's "100 hours" agenda, a genuflection to FDR's 100 Days. Perhaps this nostalgia resonates with the 5 percent of Americans who remember the 1930s....
[T]he minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. Washington, which has its hands full delivering the mail and defending the shores, should let the market do well what Washington does poorly. But that is a good idea whose time will never come again.
Will's argument is made up of the usual bromides: the market should be allowed to set wage rates, a minimum wage increase will decrease employment, a minimum wage increase will slow down the economy, and my favorite: anyone making the minimum wage isn't truly poor.
Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor.
Echidne, filling in for Atrios, finds the source for Will's information, and a little bit more:
Of those paid by the hour, 479,000 were reported as earning exactly $5.15, the prevailing Federal minimum wage. Another 1.4 million were reported as earning wages below the minimum. Together, these 1.9 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 2.5 percent of all hourly-paid workers.
Here are some more realities about the minimum wage, courtesy the Northwest Progressive Institute (pdf):
Economists look at the average wage nationally for workers who are not supervisors and calculate the minimum wage as a percentage of that. Just after 1997 when the federal minimum wage was raised to $5.15 per hour, it was worth 40% of the average wage.
Today, still at $5.15, it is worth only 31%. It has been at 50% or higher several times, most recently in 1968 (53%) (Economic Policy Institute). To reach that level today, the federal minimum wage would be over $8.00 per hour....
One way to grasp how low the federal minimum wage has fallen is to realize how little it provides a fulltime worker in a month
and in a year. At 40 hours per week, over 4.3 weeks, $5.15 means $885.80 per month.
Depending where in the country the worker lives, rent alone will eat up all or much of that. Over a full year, the worker will earn $10,712 – not enough for even a healthy single adult to live on. In 2005, 479,000 people earned this wage either full or parttime, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The policy paper has much more information to debunk the myths propogated by minimum wage opponents, those people like George Will who don't recognize what trying to live on $10,712 a year means. It's worth the read.
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