The manure is hitting the spreader as they say in farm country in the wake of the House’s passage of a new mimimum wage hike. Small businesses fear that they will be left hurting unless they get relief in other ways.
I probably wouldn’t care so much about this if the monkey business of political favoritism and hypocrisy hadn’t already raised it’s ugly head after all these “reformers” were supposedly elected.
Religious commentator Jim Berkley tells his experience with the minimum wage…
When I was 16, I had a driver’s license, a girlfriend, and no money. That’s when I became a drug runner.
Well, okay. So I actually was hired as a delivery boy for the Drive-in Pharmacy. But I did get to deliver prescriptions in the pharmacist’s hot, red Chevy SS convertible. That made up a little for the paltry 75 cents per hour that I was paid. I worked ten hours a week and got $7.50 on Friday. Full-time, that would have equaled $390 in gross annual income.
I could be paid so little because it was a “training wage.” The minimum wage at the time was $1.25, but for a number of weeks I could be paid the lower wage as I was broken in. The pharmacist didn’t really need me. But at $7.50 a week, he could afford having me on the payroll.
But then my training-wage weeks ran out. While affordable at $7.50 a week, at $12.50 I became a luxury the pharmacist could do without. He let me go.
My drug-running days were over, but I had learned something about economics: Raising the minimum wage doesn’t always help the lowest-paid workers. Sometimes it does just the opposite, making a formerly employed person unemployed, or dampening enthusiasm for the creation of jobs into which the least-skilled workers might get hired. It is not simply a matter of putting more money in the poor working man’s pocket.
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