There has been a lot of uproar in the media lately about raising the minimum wage so that those people earning it would earn a “living wage.” But what do demographics about those earning the minimum wage tell us?
According to the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is a joint effort of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, 3.7 million workers reported earning the minimum wage of $7.25 or less per hour. Now 3.7 million is a lot of people, but when looking at the entire workforce, it’s a small portion – only 2.9 percent. Slightly more than half of them are aged 16 to 24, and 62 percent of that group are students.
Nearly 80 percent of those earning the minimum wage work part-time jobs and belong to families that earn nearly triple the poverty level for a family of four at $65,900 a year, while only 22 percent live at or below the poverty line. Three percent have finished college and obtained a degree, and 5 percent are married.
Many of those aged 25 and older work in jobs where they also earn tips, like restaurant workers, so their total pay most nearly always exceeds the minimum wage. While most do not live in middle- and upper-income families, they also are not living in poverty, having an average family income of $42,500, just less than double the $22,350 poverty line level for a family of four.
Advocates of raising the minimum wage – and many minimum wage earners who respond to the hype those advocates produce – complain that you can’t raise a family or even live a decent life on the minimum wage, so therefore it should be raised to provide a “living wage.”
When you realize that only 3 of every 100 workers earn the minimum wage, the problem doesn’t seem as dire as the advocates for a wage hike want you to believe. And when you look at the kinds of work that minimum wage earners perform, and who minimum wage earners are, it seems even less dire. These jobs require little education or training, and are overwhelmingly held by young people living at home.
Based upon the demographics, there’s no economic reason for a higher minimum wage.
You won’t find trained and educated people like electricians, mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, nurses, pilots or teachers, or lawyers, doctors, CPAs, engineers, and others who have gotten an extensive education and additional training making minimum wage, or anything near it.
But more importantly, the number of minimum wage employees who really need a “living wage” because of family or unusual personal needs is very small, and there are better ways to help them.
Assuming all minimum wage employees worked 20 hours a week, a $2 increase in the minimum wage would cost employers $2,080 a year for each employee, plus increased payroll taxes. For all 3.7 million workers, the increase would cost $7.7 billion a year, plus increased payroll taxes. Those working more than 20 hours a week adds even more costs.
Additional costs arise when those making between the old and new minimums get increases to get them to the new minimum, and when those making close to the new minimum get increases to keep them proportionately higher than the new minimum. The costs would be substantially higher than $7.7 billion. And guess who bears that cost? Employers? No.
Consumers will pay higher prices, producing reduced sales, and those higher prices will also affect those who just got a raise.
A Heritage Foundation research report released last February notes that while many advocates of higher minimum wages suggest a higher wage “to help low-income single parents attempting to survive on just a minimum-wage job … just 4 percent of minimum-wage workers – or 148,000 – are single parents working full-time, compared to 5.6 percent of all U.S. workers.”
To add billions in increased consumer costs to benefit a relative few doesn’t make sense. They need to become qualified for better paying jobs, and if that is difficult or impossible for them, and if government is going to provide welfare, those people should receive help.
“Contrary to what many assume,” the Heritage report notes, “low wages are not [the] primary problem [of the poor], because most poor Americans do not work for the minimum wage. The problem is that most poor Americans do not work at all.”
The faction promoting a higher minimum wage consists primarily of two types of people: those who do not understand or don’t care about the most basic concepts of business economics, and politicians who benefit from pandering to minimum wage earners.
Current government policies are designed for purposes other than to help people escape poverty; therefore government needs to start encouraging job creation so that people in poverty have better opportunities to take control of their own lives and work their way out of poverty.
Returning America to the land of opportunity it used to be, where people were able to go as far in life as they were able, should be President Obama’s major goal.
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Death to Nidal Hasan and the better food in schools movement?
On November 5, 2009, US Army Major Nidal Hasan, a Muslim and psychiatrist at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, opened fire on his fellow soldiers inside the center, screaming “Allahu Akbar,” and killing 13 soldiers and an unborn child in her mother’s womb, and wounding 30 others.
While the victims were military personnel trained in the use of weapons, they were unarmed, forbidden from carrying on base the weapons many would use when deployed. Fortunately, Sgt. Kimberley Munley, a civilian police officer, arrived and wounded the jihadist doctor, interrupting his murderous rampage, but he shot Sgt. Munley three times, and just as the terrorist was about to finish her off, another civilian officer, Sgt. Mark Todd, shot him, and ended the killing spree.
This murderous attack left 13 dead, eight widows, one widower, 12 minor children without a father, 18 parents who lost children, 30 soldiers and one civilian police officer wounded.
There’s little positive from that event, other than that Nidal Hasan is now paralyzed from the waist down, and will likely never walk again.
Despite concerns about Hasan’s radical Islamist leanings, revealed when he was an intern at Walter Reed Medical Center, later as a physician in a PowerPoint presentation to other Army doctors, and Islamic abbreviations and phrases on his business card, the Army did not see fit to remove him from duty, or give him the punishment he so rightly deserved. In fact, an email from an Army investigator reveals the ugly politically correct nature of military service today: "Had we launched an investigation of Hasan we'd have been crucified."
Inexplicably, the charges the Department of Defense filed against Maj. Hasan ignored his Islam-based terrorist attack, but was instead labeled “workplace violence,” as if he had merely started a fight with a co-worker or thrown a chair at his boss. Such a designation deprives those soldiers killed and injured in this terrorist attack the benefits they are entitled to and would receive had accurate charges been filed.
During his opening statement at trial, in which he was convicted on all charges, Maj. Hasan apologized, not to the victims and their families, the nation or the Army, but to his fellow jihadists for not destroying more innocent life, and admitted shooting the 13 soldiers, and said he wanted the death penalty. Last week the jury sentenced him to death.
As one who believes in the death penalty for certain vicious crimes when guilt is not in question, in this case I hope that the death penalty for Nidal Hasan, a painless lethal injection, is set aside, as it has been for those in the military since 1961.
He deserves to live out his miserable life in abject misery, not in the glory of Islamic jihadist martyrdom for which he so badly hungers. Too bad that murderers, rapists, and others among the worst scum of humanity are treated so well when they are condemned to an American prison for their vicious crimes.
* * * * *
America’s First Ladies have always been advocates for important issues in our country. Rosalyn Carter championed mental health, Nancy Reagan fought against drug abuse, Barbara Bush worked to increase literacy, Hillary Clinton pushed for health reform, Laura Bush advocated for improvements in education, and Michelle Obama has worked to have a positive effect on childhood obesity.
Given the overweight nature of the US population generally, and that of the younger generation specifically, who can logically argue that a better menu in the nation’s public schools is a bad thing?
However, this particular effort has been met with resistance, and even outright rebellion, with school kids refusing to eat the better food being served in cafeterias, and school systems losing money on the deal as a result, and bailing out of the program.
One example of the growing national rebellion against the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which set new nutrition standards for school cafeterias and changed the way children are qualified for school meal programs, occurred recently at a contentious meeting of the Harlan County, Kentucky school board.
Board members were treated to a raft of complaints about school meals, which were called crappy and served in portions that critics say are too small. Someone said the meals tasted like “vomit,” and one parent said, “kids can’t learn when they’re hungry.”
Parents criticized the brown wheat bread, the skim or one-percent-fat milk, and the nonfat chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk.
Where this effort has gone wrong is that it attempts to mandate through law the way kids eat, and even though the standards set by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act are nutritionally superior to previous standards, school kids liked the old food and they don’t like the new food, and therefore don’t eat it.
In it’s own way this is a citizen rebellion against an over-reaching state: the people are against the government trying to tell them how to eat, among other things.
Our government has no business doing this. Perhaps this mild revolution will get the point across. But probably not.
Our government has no business doing this. Perhaps this mild revolution will get the point across. But probably not.
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