Minimum Wage Lies: Top 5 Lame Excuses for Not Paying You More
More: Minimum Wage Lies: Top 5 Lame Excuses for Not Paying You More
When I was young, I was taught, “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.” I could work a 40 hour week and make a decent living. I could even raise a family, send my kids to college and still look forward to retiring someday. But since trickle down economics, multiple recessions, the housing bubble, special treatment of banks ‘too big to fail’ and other corporate rot, that’s all gone. The jobs that are now available require I work two of them so I can default on a mortgage, apply for food assistance and deny my children the opportunity for a higher education. Meanwhile, the lazy rich help themselves to the fruits of my labor and produce nothing. Somehow, though, this is my fault.
The reality is that corporate America has stopped paying their workers for their work. Productivity is way up but wages are stagnant. Does that sound like the America you grew up believing in? It certainly doesn’t to me. The obvious solution is for corporate America to pay a fair minimum wage but the right finds the idea of this simple fix horrifying. When asked, those on the right use canned responses to explain why you don’t, and shouldn’t, make a living wage. Here are the top 5 “reasons” and why they’re completely wrong.
(1) Raising The Minimum Wage Will Cost Jobs
The biggest lie. Several studies have shown that increasing the minimum wage reduces turnover, increases spending and increases demand. These studies have all come to the conclusion that raising the wage has a negligible effect one way or another on job creation.
U.S. experience, it turns out, offers many ‘natural experiments’ here, in which one state raises its minimum wage while others do not. And while there are dissenters, as there always are, the great preponderance of the evidence from these natural experiments points to little if any negative effect of minimum wage increases on employment. - Paul Krugman
Does giving an increase really cost jobs? No. It seems that the real “problem” with an increase is that it affects profit margins. We, as a country, can more than afford increases on the minimum wage at the cost of a wage decrease on those earning the maximum. In other words, millions of poor workers can make more if millionaires and billionaires lose a tiny fraction of their yearly income. Clearly, you can see why corporate America is allergic to this idea. Sacrifce a third yacht so millions of people don’t have to use food stamps to survive? Blasphemy!