The Case For Raising The Minimum Wage

Boehner must feel like the little Dutch boy with his fingers in the dike, holding back the flood-- in this case, the flood of popular comprehensive immigration reform, the flood of popular passage of a bill to end workplace discrimination against the LGBT community, the flood against reining in domestic spying on American citizens by the NSA and, of course, the flood to enact a popular and long overdue rise in the minimum wage. Despite almost sure passage of all these things, Boehner refuses to let the House vote on any of them. He's too busy trying to further gut the food stamps program for hungry American families. Merry Xmas; Boehner is a Catholic, but of the Church-without-Jesus variety. Bernie Sanders isn't a Catholic, but his views are much more in line with Pope Francis than Boehner's are. Sanders sent this to his followers yesterday:

The greatest crisis facing our country today is the obscene level of wealth and income economic inequality we now see. This is a moral issue, an economic issue, and a political issue.

  While the very rich get richer, the middle class continues to disappear and we now have more people living in poverty than ever before. Despite huge increases in technology and productivity, tens of millions of workers are finding it harder to feed their families, pay for health care, send their kids to college or put aside savings for retirement.

While large corporations are earning record-breaking profits, real unemployment is close to 14%, and youth unemployment is at 20%.  An entire generation of young people is struggling to find a place in the economy and repay their college loans.

In recent years, with 95% of all new income going to the top 1%, we have seen a huge increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires. One family, the Walton family of WalMart, now owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans. Meanwhile, we continue to have, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.

While the average American is increasingly alienated from the political process, billionaire families like the Koch brothers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who support their extreme right-wing views.

During the last week a new and important ally has arisen in the struggle against unfettered capitalism and wealth and income inequality. In his recently published Exhortation, Pope Francis warns the world against the idolatry of money and the false promise of trickle-down economics.

Clearly, not everyone shares Francis’ religion, and many of us have deep differences with a number of positions taken by the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, we can all, I think, share his commitment to economic justice and learn from his wise assessment of how modern civilization, in its relentless pursuit of profit and its dependence on “the market” to make final valuations of what is good, has lost touch with the ethical imperatives that should guide our society. I appeal to other religious leaders to focus on matters of economic justice and to speak out from the context of their own respective traditions.

These are tough times for our country. Let’s go forward together.

He followed that with an even longer catalogue of Pope Francis' recent teachings about Jesus' message, something Boehner and Republicans like him-- think Paul Ryan, for example-- have nothing but contempt for. And that brings us back to the battle raging in Congress to raise the minimum wage. Although "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel, inept chairman of the DCCC recruited and is helping to finance Ohio anti-minimum wage reactionary Jennifer Garrison, most Democrats are big supporters of raising the minimum wage. A handful from the Republican-wing of the Democratic Party (Blue Dogs, New Dems and Steve Israel recruits) aside, normal Democrats want the raise and so do, it turns out, most Republicans.

Sunday Paul Krugman explained why raising the minimum wage-- regardless of what fake DCCC Democrat Jennifer Garrison says-- is a good idea, a very, very good idea.

The last few decades have been tough for many American workers, but especially hard on those employed in retail trade-- a category that includes both the sales clerks at your local Walmart and the staff at your local McDonald’s. Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade-- who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with-- have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973.

So can anything be done to help these workers, many of whom depend on food stamps-- if they can get them-- to feed their families, and who depend on Medicaid-- again, if they can get it-- to provide essential health care? Yes. We can preserve and expand food stamps, not slash the program the way Republicans want. We can make health reform work, despite right-wing efforts to undermine the program.

And we can raise the minimum wage.

First, a few facts. Although the national minimum wage was raised a few years ago, it’s still very low by historical standards, having consistently lagged behind both inflation and average wage levels. Who gets paid this low minimum? By and large, it’s the man or woman behind the cash register: almost 60 percent of U.S. minimum-wage workers are in either food service or sales. This means, by the way, that one argument often invoked against any attempt to raise wages-- the threat of foreign competition-- won’t wash here: Americans won’t drive to China to pick up their burgers and fries.

…[W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment, while significantly increasing workers’ earnings.

It’s important to understand how good this evidence is. Normally, economic analysis is handicapped by the absence of controlled experiments. For example, we can look at what happened to the U.S. economy after the Obama stimulus went into effect, but we can’t observe an alternative universe in which there was no stimulus, and compare the results.

When it comes to the minimum wage, however, we have a number of cases in which a state raised its own minimum wage while a neighboring state did not. If there were anything to the notion that minimum wage increases have big negative effects on employment, that result should show up in state-to-state comparisons. It doesn’t.

So a minimum-wage increase would help low-paid workers, with few adverse side effects. And we’re talking about a lot of people. Early this year the Economic Policy Institute estimated that an increase in the national minimum wage to $10.10 from its current $7.25 would benefit 30 million workers. Most would benefit directly, because they are currently earning less than $10.10 an hour, but others would benefit indirectly, because their pay is in effect pegged to the minimum-- for example, fast-food store managers who are paid slightly (but only slightly) more than the workers they manage.

Now, many economists have a visceral dislike of anything that sounds like price-fixing, even if the evidence strongly indicates that it would have positive effects. Some of these skeptics oppose doing anything to help low-wage workers. Others argue that we should subsidize, not regulate-- in particular, that we should expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (E.I.T.C.), an existing program that does indeed provide significant aid to low-income working families. And for the record, I’m all for an expanded E.I.T.C.

But there are, it turns out, good technical reasons to regard the minimum wage and the E.I.T.C. as complements-- mutually supportive policies, not substitutes. Both should be increased. Unfortunately, given the political realities, there is no chance whatsoever that a bill increasing aid to the working poor would pass Congress.

An increase in the minimum wage, on the other hand, just might happen, thanks to overwhelming public support. This support doesn’t come just from Democrats or even independents; strong majorities of Republicans (57 percent) and self-identified conservatives (59 percent) favor an increase.

In short, raising the minimum wage would help many Americans, and might actually be politically possible. Let’s give it a try.

Giving it a try means, among other things, helping defeat Democrats who oppose raising the minimum wage, not just Republicans who oppose it. Jennifer Garrison is an obvious example but so are 6 incumbent Democrats who crossed the aisle and voted against raising the minimum wage last time it came up in the House (March 15, 2013). All 6 are rotten to the core anyway and have earned defeat on any number of items that betray their conservative agendas:

• John Barrow (New Dem-GA)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Mike McIntyre (New Dem-NC)
• Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Kurt Shrader (New Dem-OR)