You want to know why minimum wage increases don’t work?  They’re too obvious.  Economics is difficult to understand, but I do know one thing about human beings: we’re self-polarizers.  We don’t want to have anything to do with socioeconomic equality.  And when the government enforces socioeconomic equality on us, we do whatever we can to break back into a rich/poor world.

Raising the minimum wage to help the poor.  Let me say it in more logicial terms: more money…..for POOR PEOPLE.  This is along the same line of thinking as the “Donuts for fatties” and “Free Cars and Booze for Alcoholics” programs of the late sixties.

Tuesday’s minimum wage increase (seventy cents, poverty is over!) were the first in ten years.  That probably seems like a long time if you’re a hippie.

The way I see it, there are a few arguments for the minimum wage that logically seem to have a valid point, even though they dont.  In short, they are:

1. Minimum wage needs to be changed to meet inflation’s rate of change.
2. Giving poor people money will help them, you heartless freak.

Argument One seems to make sense, because it involves economic thought slightly more thorough than “1=1.”  What’s wrong with it?

Notice how I worded it.  “Needs to be changed.”  Minimum wage doesn’t need anything.  It’s a formless concept.  The argument that the government owes you a minimum wage because of increasing costs of living stems from post-New Deal, post-Great Society thinking that says “forget reality, let’s operate government like we’re kindergartners and do what sounds good!”

There are people who know more about economics than I do at the American Economics Association.  A 2006 survey said that about 37% of them wanted an increase in the minimum wage, while 46% wanted them completely elimated.  Not static, not decreased.  GONE.

Or, since that’s not enough for people who disagree with me (I can smell you), according to a report by the Fraser Institute, the following things are true about minimum wage increases:

• Higher minimum wage leads to less on-the-job training, high school dropouts, employer benefits, and unemployment.
• The “typical” minimum-wager is someone who lives with their parents in the first place.  Sixty percent.  Cost of living still goes to Mom and Dad.
• Most low-paid workers, as a correleation to the above, don’t actually belong to low-income families.

The report ultimately concludes this:

Higher minimum wages are unlikely to raise the incomes of the poor.

So I’m not being cold, I’m being right.

Democrats tout minimum wage as a dangling muffin in front of the low-income voters they so desperately need to get by.  Even if you think Republicans do the same with low taxes for the rich…well, we both know which policy actually works.

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