The minimum-wage debate - bad idea
President Obama, left, delivers the State of the Union address to a joint… (Charles Dharapak / Bloomberg ) In announcing his wrongheaded proposal to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour, President Obama spoke in lofty terms: "In the wealthiest nation on Earth," he said in his State of the Union address last month, "no one who works full time should have to live in poverty." If the debate proceeds as it has -- many times -- in the past, then most Democrats will embrace the president's message and back the proposal, while most Republicans will oppose it, on the grounds that higher labor costs will lead to higher unemployment. For The Record Los Angeles Times Tuesday, March 12, 2013 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 11 Editorial Desk 0 inches; 18 words Type of Material: Correction Minimum wage: In a March 10 Op-Ed article, coauthor Kevin A. Hassett's surname was misspelled in the byline. But we shouldn't rely on political opinions in this debate. Why?
Minimum wage hike good for economy, taxpayers
Through a translator, Bernardo Chimoro, of Central Falls, tells Kate Brewster, of the Economic Progress Institute, and congressmen David Cicilline and Jim Langevin why raising the minimum wage would help him and others in his community. (Photo by Bob Plain) If corporate America was still run by businessmen like Henry Ford, we probably wouldn’t need to have a minimum wage law. Ford, said Congressman Jim Langevin recently, “wanted his workers to earn a wage that was sufficient for them to buy an automobile that he produced. He recognized with a strong middle class, with a strong working class, that the economy does better, and his company did better.” Of course, somewhere along the way the business ethic of Henry Ford was subverted by that of the Koch brothers – making a meaningful minimum wage more important than ever to the American economy. “Raising the minimum wage is trickle down economics that actually works,” Langevin said. Share
Obama throws support to minimum wage movement in economy speech | World news
Barack Obama warned that a "relentless, decades-long trend" of growing inequality and social immobility posed a fundamental threat to the American dream on Wednesday, throwing his support behind a grassroots movement to address chronically low wages across the US. Attempting to regain the political momentum after a calamitous two months in which his healthcare reforms were plagued by website failures, the president said reversing the growing gap between rich and poor was "the defining challenge of our time". In a speech delivered in one of the poorest areas of Washington DC, Obama said: “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.” The federal minimum wage currently stands at $7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year. "That’s why it’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that, in real terms right now, is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office."
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Congress passes the buck, so localities bump up the minimum wage
State and local governments haven't always used their role as the "laboratories of democracy" wisely or for the general good. (The phrase reaches us indirectly from the great progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.) But the expanding movement to increase state and local minimum wages is an encouraging sign of wisdom in the grass roots. The most recent example comes from the small Washington city of SeaTac, which as you might surmise is the location of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The residents of this working-class community voted last month to set a minimum wage of $15 an hour for airport and hotel workers within its borders. The measure, which passed by a razor thin margin, is still ...
D.C. Council backs $11.50 minimum wage
The D.C. Council must hold a final vote on the rate-increase measure and send it to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), probably early next year. But with all 13 council members pledging their support, the final vote appeared to be a formality and likely wide enough to override a veto by Gray, who repeated Tuesday that he would prefer a smaller increase — to $10 an hour. After Gray announced Monday that he would seek a second term, the high-profile minimum-wage vote set the stage for a day of intense political theater in and around the council chambers on Pennsylvania Avenue. The votes needed to pass the measure had been a foregone conclusion for days, but with four council members running for mayor and five more seeking reelection to the council next year, the suspense rested on who would claim credit. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), a mayoral candidate who has been working to burnish his credentials with business leaders, cast a decisive no-vote against the Wal-Mart bill in September.
Raising American Wages…by Raising American Wages
With Americans still trapped in the fifth year of our Great Recession, and median personal income having been essentially stagnant for forty years, perhaps we should finally admit that decades of economic policies have largely failed. The last two years of our supposed recovery have seen American growth rates averaging well under 2 percent.[i] Although our media often pays greater attention to the recent gains in stock market and asset prices, such paltry growth means that many of the millions of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 will never be regained, and the broadest measures of American unemployment and underemployment will remain stuck in the vicinity of 15%.[ii] Meanwhile, an astonishing 93% of the total increase in income during the recovery period has been captured by the top one percent of earners, who now hold almost as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent of our society. Consider that only 20% of current jobs require even a bachelors’ degree. Graphic by New America Foundation
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Raising Minimum Wage Is Misguided Policy - Room for Debate
Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the president of the American Action Forum. He was the director of the Congressional Budget Office and a chief economist of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. The protests, ballot initiatives and other efforts aimed at the the minimum (or living) wage are not political events. They reflect a real economic problem: the growing distress of the millions of out-of-work and lower-wage workers trapped by a failed response to the Great Recession and the ensuing anemic recovery. With 11.3 million people looking for work, it is simply perverse to redistribute from the job seekers to the job holders. Increasing the minimum wage is a misguided way to address the situation. According to recent American Action Forum research, 80 percent of minimum wage workers are not actually in poverty, increasing the federal minimum to $10, as some have proposed, wouldn't benefit 99 percent of the people in poverty. Who would be helped by a minimum wage increase?
