Minimum wage? Let's discuss

[hoosier]

Some givens:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0130/p14s01-cogn.html

As it is, an employee working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour makes $10,712 a year, about $1,000 above the official poverty level for an individual ($9,654).

18 states and the District of Columbia have enacted higher minimum wage laws, from about $6.15 to $12 an hour ... the federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in nine years.

Since members of Congress last voted to boost the minimum wage, they have raised their own pay by 23 percent. Last October, the Senate voted 51 to 49 to hike the minimum wage, but it would have taken a supermajority of 60 votes to pass.


http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0601300839.asp

This incessant glibness of liberal politicians and activists who imagine themselves the only champions of the poor is what blinds them to new ideas. Their worldview supposes that poverty is (1) an intractable flaw in free-market capitalism, (2) deep and persistent, and (3) made worse by globalization cum neo-imperialism. Amazingly, none of the charges holds water when tested against real-world data.

A major investigative series in the New York Times last summer reported that only half of the members of the poorest quintile in 1988 were still there a decade later.

Many of America's "poorest" people in terms of income are simply retired or in college. A 2003 publication by the Federal Reserve bank of Minnesota noted that nearly a quarter of households have no earnings whatsoever ...

... the Times own survey of American attitudes about poverty. Only 16 percent of respondents believe that their socioeconomic class is lower than when they grew up. In absolute terms, 45 percent of Americans recognize that they are really wealthier than their parents, and 38 percent say they are the same.

... EPI (a labor union think tank) recommends at the end of its new paper: a higher minimum wage, more generous unemployment benefits, easing welfare rules, and higher taxes on the rich. EPI does this with a straight face, though certainly their researchers must have noticed that states with higher minimum wages and highly progressive tax codes (see New York) tend to have the highest income gaps.... the bigger story is in the footnotes where you learn that incomes among the poor are rising in every state as well.