Minimum wage argument flawed

I’ve always wanted to hear a solid argument for raising the minimum wage. After reading Amelia Herbert’s Jan. 21 column, I’m still waiting. The idea that simply giving minimum wage workers more money will help anything is on par with the idea that the United States could solve its deficit problem by simply printing more money.

Let’s assume for the moment another increase in the minimum wage, by $1.50 for the sake of argument. This would only increase the salary of a minimum wage worker to $13,832 per year. This means that paying three workers would cost the same as paying four at the old rate. So three out of four workers are still under the poverty line, and the fourth is collecting an unemployment check to go along with all the rest of his government assistance.

To bring the salary up to $25,000 per year would require a minimum wage of $12. I don’t need to explain the countless problems such an increase would create, but I can sum them up with one word: outsourcing.

For the most part, however, minimum wage jobs are not even held by the poor. Census data indicate that of the 1.6 million minimum wage earners, more than half are under 23 years old. Those over 23 manage an average family income of $38,100 per year. About 80 percent of minimum wage earners are not the primary income earners in their family. And if all that weren’t enough, two-thirds of minimum wage workers receive raises within the first year, at an average of 14 percent. In other words, the jobs are not dead ends.

What does this all mean? No viable increase in minimum wage would bring anybody out of poverty, and most of the money would go into the pockets of kids, as opposed to the poverty-stricken, anyway. The moral of the story: blindly throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it, even if the problem is poverty.

Grant Degler

Trinity ’06