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March 11, 2014
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Conservatives should be on the front line of the battle to raise the
minimum wage. Work is supposed to make one independent, but with the
inflation-adjusted federal minimum down by a third from its peak,
low-wage workers depend on billions of dollars in public assistance just to make ends meet. Just this week, Rachel West and Michael Reich
released a study conducted for the Center for American Progress that found raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would save taxpayers $4.6 billion in spending on food stamps.
And
even if you break your back working in today’s low-wage economy, it’s
exceedingly difficult to raise yourself up by the bootstraps; it’s all
but impossible to put yourself through school or save enough money to
start a business if you’re making anything close to $7.25 an hour.
But
those predisposed to defending the interests of corporate America –
including retailers and fast-food restaurants – oppose any increase.
That’s tough given that 73 percent of Americans – including 53 percent
of registered Republicans – favor hiking the minimum to $10.10 per hour,
according to
a Pew poll conducted in January.
So
those opposed to giving low-income workers a raise offer a number of
claims suggesting it would be a supposedly bad idea. Unfortunately for
their cause, all of their arguments fall apart under close scrutiny.
Here are the ones deployed most frequently.
“It’s a monstrous job-killer”
Big business conservatives crowed when
a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
projected that a hike to $10.10 might cost the economy 500,000 jobs –
never mind that it would have raised the incomes of around 17 million
Americans. But a number of
economists disputed the CBO finding. One of them, John Schmitt from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, studied years of research on the question, and
found that the “weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage.”
We
also have real-world experience with higher minimums. In 1998, the
citizens of Washington State voted to raise theirs and then link future
increases to the rate of inflation. Today, at $9.32, the Evergreen State
has the highest minimum wage in the country – not far from the $10.10
per hour proposed by Barack Obama. At the time it was passed, opponents
promised it would kill jobs and ultimately hurt the workers it was
designed to help.
But it didn’t turn out that way. This week,
Bloomberg’s Victoria Stilwell, Peter Robison and William Selway
reported:
“In the 15 years that followed… job growth continued at an average 0.8
percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate.
Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly
vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has
trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.”
“It will hurt mom-and-pop businesses”
Another
argument is that it would disproportionately hurt small businesses –
giving the Wal-Marts of the world an unfair advantage over mom and pop.
But
a poll of 500 small business owners from
across the country released on Thursday undermines that talking point.
The survey, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Small
Business Majority, found that small business owners support a hike to
$10.10 per hour by a 57-43 margin. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed
say they already pay their employees more than the minimum and 52
percent agreed that if the wage floor is raised, “people will have a
higher percentage of their income to spend on goods and services” and
small businesses “will be able to grow and hire new workers.”
“Major costs will be passed along to consumers”
Opponents
also claim that higher wages would mean significantly higher prices and
that those cost increases would effectively eat up whatever extra
earnings low-wage workers ended up taking home. But
a 2011 study conducted
by Ken Jacobs and Dave Graham-Squire at the UC-Berkeley Center for
Labor Research and Education and Stephanie Luce at CUNY’s Murphy
Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies estimated that raising
the minimum wage to $12 per hour – two bucks more than what’s currently
on the table – would increase the cost of an average shopping trip to
Wal-Mart by just 46 cents – or around $12 per year. And
another paper published last September by economists Jeannette Wicks Lim and Robert Pollin estimated
that a hike to $10.50 an hour would likely result in the price of a Big
Mac increasing by only a dime, from $4.50 to $4.60, on average.
If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since its inception in 1968,
it would now stand at $10.74 per hour. With the share of our nation’s output going to workers’
wages at an all-time low —
and inequality on the rise — it’s easy to understand why the idea of
raising it to $10.10 is so popular. And despite opponents’ dire
warnings, there’s really no good reason that we shouldn’t do so.
If you agree, you can
here to let your representative know thatyou support a raise for the working poor.
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