Fox News to America: Minimum Wage of $7.25/Hr Good Enough for You
More: Fox News to America: Minimum Wage of $7.25/Hr Good Enough for You
Yesterday’s Bulls & Bears opened with an effort to kill a discussion about calls for raising the minimum wage. Host Brenda Buttner began by asking regular Gary B. Smith, a reliable conservative voice on the show, “Will maximizing the minimum wage minimize or maximize our job growth?”
Right on schedule, Smith said “It’s going to kill job growth, especially when you get right down to it, what the minimum wage does, it discriminates against less-skilled workers, it’s plain and simple. New York, in 2006, raised their minimum wage from about $5.15 to $6.75. They saw a 20% increase in unemployment against younger, lesser skilled workers. In 2007, before the recession started, unemployment amongst young black teenagers… was about 29%. Now, after all the stimulus and what we’ve done, it’s now 40%. So it’s - clearly, it works against these workers.”
David Mercer was the lone liberal on the five-person panel. He said, “With all-time profits now being experienced by corporations, it’s about time after four years that workers get a fair share of that. And I think in doing so, you also help the economy by giving them more affordable wages to have more economic security. That puts in more buying power, and increases demand that overall increases growth in the economy leading to other hiring.”
After that comment, Buttner quickly stepped in to redirect the conversation - in a direction that just happened to highlight and promote conservative ideology. She “asked” another reliable conservative on the panel, John Layfield, “Does this just ignore supply and demand in the job market?”
Sure enough, Layfield replied, “Yeah it does ignore supply and demand completely. Look, I love the argument here that these companies are making so much money, how dare they make so much money? And I love the jobs plan. You have got companies who have a lot of cash on balance sheets, so the jobs plan of the administration is, we want you to take that cash and hire people you don’t need. Look, the minimum wage affects only about 2.9% of workers, and understand the average family that has a minimum wage worker makes $53,000 per year.”
Buttner again steered the discussion into conservative-talking-point territory by asking another conservative regular, Tracy Byrnes, “The job creators… are they the ones who are going to get hit the hardest by this?”
Byrnes took the ball and ran with into the “smear those who disagree as socialists” territory. She said, “Absolutely. I mean, You raise the minimum wage, they can’t afford the extra dishwasher in the kitchen. And why should they? When they can have family members do it. It hurts the entry-level jobs. It’s going to hurt our teenagers. …This notion that we’re going to keep raising it just to share the wealth ‘cause, ‘Well, we’re almost socialist anyway at this point,’ is ridiculous.”
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