Reality intrudes upon the “Reality Based Community”
Nobody in the Reineke family is happy about Michigan’s first minimum wage increase in 10 years.
Nineteen-year-old John Reineke’s work hours at a snack shop at Central Michigan University were cut in half when the minimum wage went up the first time in October, and his family’s ice cream shop will employ fewer workers this summer when the wage goes up again.
Like the Reinekes’ ice cream shop, businesses across the state — from small restaurants to colleges to Goodwill Industries — are bracing for the second bump in the state’s minimum in July, when it will increase from $6.95 an hour to $7.15. It will go up a third time, to $7.40, on July 1, 2008.
About 464,000 Michigan workers, or about one in six, will directly benefit from the increases, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Advocates of the increases say they’re long overdue and will help families and the economy in the long run.
But hundreds of businesses — mostly small and mostly in the service industry, particularly fast food — disagree. They say they are cutting workers’ hours, hiring fewer workers and raising the prices of their goods to make up for the extra expense of the higher wages. Critics also question the timing of the increases, saying they only do more damage to a state already in financial straits.
In any given week, you can visit a left-wing blog and find some sort of link to some Keynesian economist who will articulate that raising the minimum wage does not cut the number of minimum wage jobs.
But these economists have 1. Never run their own small business employing minimum wage employees, and 2. Rarely, if ever, ventured outside of their protected little university teaching jobs to see how things work in the real world.
So what the leftists have is a number of long treatises about how the minimum wage is a good thing that helps people out. They read them as gospel and if ever someone invades their little bubble with something from reality, like this article, they immidately blame the business owner for not taking what I have heard called numerous time as “A Cut in Profits”.
They are a sick bunch of fucks, aren’t they?
Found at Right Thinking
Same thing in Ohio. Wage went up and all the help wanted signs disappear. At my wife’s job the servers are now busing tables while they serve food because the people who bused the tables had their hours cut. Just a minor health violation!
If raising the minimum wage leads to economic growth, how come all the Captains of Industry are trying so mightily to reduce wages just to stay in business?
Put another way, and it galls me to say it, but more proof is right there in the revitalized tech-sector’s habit of outsourcing call centers to India. Call centers have lots of low wage jobs, and there are damn few of them left in the US.
Higher wages DO NOT lead to a booming economy, higher PRODUCTION does. If the higher minimum wage were coupled with a proportional increase in production, no one would have a problem with it, but that is never the case, especially since those folks holding the minimum wage jobs are either too new to working or too dumb to hold a better job, and asking them to voluntarily increase their production has as much effect as wishing upon a star.