Minimum efforts

This debate isn’t over

When the parliamentarian of the United States Senate ruled that the minimum wage increase sought by some senators couldn’t be included in the covid-relief bill, small business owners across the land might have breathed a bit easier.

Don’t. As our friends on the left have made clear, this debate isn’t over. The “fight for $15” has only begun.

To which many wellmeaning folks will doubtless say: Good! The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since the first year of the Obama administration.

Or as a guest columnist for The Washington Post put it this week: “A $15 wage does not leave anyone rolling in cash.

It just gives a worker a decent chance to pay the rent, buy groceries, and cover bus fare and other routine expenses.” (See column nearby.)

Sure, for a little while. But what if that grocer has to raise prices to pay his employees more? Once prices for everything start to rise — surely owners won’t just eat the added costs of doing business — how much help would it be to raise the minimum wage?

And even NPR had a story earlier this week about how small businesses would be negatively affected by doubling the minimum wage.

Some large companies have made the news in the last year for raising their minimum wages themselves — without any government mandate. Good for them, and their entry-level employees. And some of those mega-businesses aren’t satisfied with just raising the pay for their employees. They’re chasing good PR, and good thoughts they’ll never get from some quarters, by suggesting all other businesses do the same.

But what’s good for Costco and Amazon might not be good for a much smaller business. An economist at Texas A&M told The Wall Street Journal last week: “It’s a lot harder for Joe’s Hardware. We should take note that Amazon — the place with no cashiers — is the one calling for a higher minimum wage.”

The Congressional Budget Office (a nonpartisan outfit) said that 27 million workers could get raises if congressional leaders finally find enough Bernie Sanderses to get this done. And that even 900,000 Americans could be lifted out of official poverty with such a raise in the minimum wage. But it also noted that 1.4 million Americans could lose their jobs because of it, too.

That’s always been the point: As Thomas Sowell once said, the minimum wage is always zero.

“No one wants to hire a 17-year-old to pay them $15 off the bat with no experience,” one business executive told The Journal. “It’s not meant to be a lifelong wage. It is meant to be a minimum wage to incentivize people to move up to do other things.”

Well, we can’t agree that no one wants to do that. About half the people in Congress are behind such an idea.

But it’s not their money they’d give away. Or their jobs that would be lost.

THE NATION might have been given an early look at the next strategy to get to $15. When the parliamentarian of the Senate nixed the wage increase, Sen. Sanders had the bright idea to amend legislation to pressure business. That is, to raise taxes on “large, profitable” businesses that don’t pay workers at least as much as he believes is sufficient. We’re not sure if he wants to punish “large” or “profitable,” but the effects might be the same: fewer people with jobs.

Every time we have to make these arguments — against the best intentions of the opposing side — we are reminded of something said by Milton Friedman, who knew something about economics: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

The “fight for $15” would help some, no doubt. But the good intentions will leave hundreds of thousands of the least-experienced, mostly young and struggling American workers something worse:

Destitute.