Minimum Wage for a Minimal Citizenry

To those harping about the minimum wage, your rhetoric fails to take in the full picture. The latest CBO report shows that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could kill up to 1 Million jobs by the time it is fully implemented.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that around 3.6 Million people are paid minimum wage. A large portion of those are young people, with much less education and experience than their higher paid counterparts.

So, even if the CBO report is totally wrong and a minimum wage hike results in ZERO job cuts, this is still only benefitting about 1% of the total workforce.

The bigger issue here is twofold. Firstly anytime the minimum wage has increased, consumer prices rise proportionally. Secondly, chances are all of the hourly workers making around $10 an hour won't see a proportional rise in their wages. So all that is really accomplished is a large swath of jobs that used to be considered "well paying" or at least decent now become bottom feeding minimum wage jobs. If this happens the left will surely grandstand and go on and on about how they have lifted all of these people out of poverty, while neglecting to mention that the poverty line should slide upward with a rise in consumer prices, so in reality they have created more poverty not less.

But the politicians and the media know that the average citizen knows little to nothing about real economics, so the poor will demand a larger portion of the table scraps which they have become accustomed to surviving on, unaware that these actions will do nothing but increase their numbers while nobody really gets ahead at all.

I understand that young people need to get by, and because of this horrible job market "AKA wonderful economic recovery according to our dear leader" that more and more older workers have had to take minimum wage jobs just to try and make ends meet. However, for whatever reason the left never wants to admit that these jobs were never meant to be careers, they were meant to be an "entry level" opportunity for young people to get experience and work their way up. How the left rationalizes prosperity as wallowing in a combination of low wages and government assistance is beyond me.

If we are really going to attempt government investment as a way to spur job growth, (a shaky idea to start with) shouldn't we be investing in ways to pull these people up to the next rungs of the job market, instead of trying to force burger flipping to be higher up the food chain than it should be? Couldn't just the money spent on government studies about wages be used to fund better job training programs and trade schools?

You can't force prosperity and success on people. The people have to want it and go get it. Otherwise it's not really prosperity or success it is only a handout.

So the real question becomes: Why all the fuss over such a miniscule percentage of the total workforce? The easy answer being perceptions and votes. This being an election year, it is pretty obvious that this is the Democratic Party's attempt to take back the House. The plan being to get the Republicans to go on record as voting against the minimum wage increase, and then lambasting them with attack ads all summer long proclaiming that the Republicans hate the poor and only cater to the top 1%.

The reality of course is not nearly so cut and dry. Sure, the so called "progressives" love the poor, but only to the extent that they are politically expedient. They love the poor to stay poor and to grow in number. The progressive movement makes its political hay out of taking middle class tax dollars and turning it into entitlement programs for the poor. Their policies expand the lower class and in turn they continue to vote for the progressives and their promises of "free stuff". They play on the people's insecurities and talk about "class warfare" trying to make it poor vs rich. When in reality it is really the ruling class vs everyone who doesn't make them richer and more powerful. It really is what can only be described as Neo-Feudalism. Their idea of progress is to take us back into serfdom. They want you as distracted and uneducated as possible so that you will just take their word as gospel truth.

So we see that for all of the supposed good intentions, when it comes to politics there are always hidden motives behind everything. The sooner the powers that be are held to account, and their lies and motives exposed, the sooner we can start moving toward real economic growth and prosperity.